The Year of Loss

Death seems random to us, but, really it’s life that’s more random. There is a certainty to death, and a completeness. And it’s a great leveler: death ends all privileges, and misfortunes. It’s only life that tends to care about the millions of different variables we obsess with. But life is just a tiniest passage of time between one non-being state and another, in the infinite span of eternity. Death is almost eternal, only interrupted by that brief spec of time. It’s just that life seems like the only time that there is. And it is, in a way, unless you believe in reincarnation and/or destructibility of soul. For us, time starts and ends with us. Literally.

I’ve been protected from death for a long time — death of people I cared deeply about. At least, death had been kind enough to take them away from me when they were far off, in another city/town. In the last two years, that’s changed — as it was bound to happen sometime. Being on this side of forty, one is much more likely to think about death, for it’s much more in the face, even if you’re not thinking of the possibility your own death. 

To see the dead body of a friend — someone you spent time with in a PG hostel, you worked alongside, you shared many a meals with —  with a weirdly calm expression on his face, after having jumped to his death; to get a fleeting glimpse of your father’s face, with cotton stuffed into his nostrils, and covered in a yellow plastic body bag, that the kind attendant, against the protocol, opened for a minute before loading his body into the ambulance for its final terrestrial trip; to see the lifeless body of your father-in-law, barely six months later, a man without any real old age markers like diabetes or blood pressure, whom you met a month before, healthy as always; to see the dead body of an uncle, who finally lost his battle with dementia after already having lost his ability to understand any of it; to see a body sliding into an electrical furnace, or engulf in flames on a wooden pyre that you lit, even if symbolically, and to know with certainty, what we’d not see the person again, except in our dreams, and our memories. Memories that will become precious in an instant, because we know the finality of what just happened, and the fear it brings, that even those are fleeting, that one is losing them, losing their sharpness, their color, their shape, their very ethereal reality; to see a person you knew for decades being reduced to a fading memory, and a material non-being — it makes death less of a concept, and more of an experience.

It’s easy to understand the appeal of a soul that is indestructible — an essence of us surviving the ravages of time, in some space-less void, or another dimension, or whatever. It’s hard to accept that finality of death. We yearn for our loved ones to have an existence beyond. And yet, when you’ve seen an extremely intelligent person lose memory and cognition even with their body intact in front of you, it’s hard to believe in the soul surviving without a body, seeing and hearing things, when with a body it struggled to hold on to that.

As a rationalist/materialist, one has to deal with death differently than those who can believe in the Gods and the afterlife. The rituals are not for us. They don’t bring in closure, and they don’t assure us of any false hopes. We have, ironically, accepted it’s over, and are struggling to find new ways to deal with loss and grief, knowing that the rituals invented for it do not quite cut it for us. 

This year in particular has been brutal. As we stand up after a blow, another comes. And knowing this might just be another year, in time there will be more such years — that scares the hell out of you. You wonder how much fortitude you have in you? Can you keep getting up after each such blow — especially after you’re unable to lean on the tried and tested cultural ways of dealing with it, because you can see through them, and they become empty actions for you? That you have to find ways that work for you, while you’re in the middle of it?

I don’t have answers. I just know, that death is a profoundly humbling experience — for those who survive it. It makes you reconsider how you are living your life. Death was, of course, no surprise to anyone, but the concept of death, and the experience of death near you — those are two entirely different things. I hope there is a silver lining to all this. No I don’t believe in bromides like: everything happens for a reason (no there isn’t), or people who die are in a better place (not they aren’t), or that things will get better (not, not always). The sliver lining I’ve in mind is more humble: maybe the experience will make me live the rest of my years a little better. That, those who made me a better person while living, would make me a little better person in death too. Hope is eternal, in the human scale of time.

To those who have lost their dear ones in this difficult year, or those who’re grieving for someone they lost, no matter what the timeline, may you all find some closure, with the closing of the year. It’s symbolic, the very concept of year. But it gives us a pause, to take a stock. May the memories, those that you want to cherish, stay with you always. Take care.

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Note: This is a minimal rewrite of my thread on Twitter. Writing about death, and grief/loss, has helped me tremendously with coping with it all. And I hope, it helps someone, somewhere, a tiny bit too.